This anti-science is getting more and more strident. I haven't been to the USA since 2001 and am wondering whether it has gone rabidly to the right and makes Reagan look like a leftie!
----- Original Message -----
From: Robert Schneider
To: Michael Roberts
Cc: asa@calvin.edu
Sent: Tuesday, September 06, 2005 12:13 PM
Subject: Re: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False

I agree, Michael, but I think, unfortunately, that the attitude toward scientists expressed in Janice's screed are all too common among ID supporters and reflect a growing anti-science movement in the US. Science has become enmeshed in the culture wars here. The inherent methodological skepticism that a scientist should bring to the reading of any published research is one thing. But what we have here, I think, is the creation of negative images of the scientific endeavor for the purposes of ideological agendas, and loaded rhetoric that characterizes any scientific hypotheses or research the anti-science people don't like with terms like "junk science" promoted by advocates of "the religion of scientism." As charges that the present US administration's ideologues have been manipulating scientific research, some by its own agencies, for its own purposes, e.g., in the controversy over global warming, becomes more of a public issue, you can bet that partisan attacks against the research and those who conduct it will grow. I think that the scientific community as a whole have been slow to respond to this state of affairs publically, for example it has taken a decade to wake up to the assault on mainstream science by the ID advocates and see the growing negative effects it has engendered in the American public. Public confidence in science in this country has eroded, perhaps for a number of reasons (e.g., the unintended negative effects of some technological applications of scientific discoveries; or technological applications that go against some peoples' religious beliefs), but one of them has been the conflict over evolution and ID and the success of the ID people in morphing sincere believers' apprehensions about evolution into a more general distrust of science. All of the above is, of course, MHO.

## My conclusion? Follow the money. Money, power, and approval from their peers is what motivates those who engage in junk science and the religion of scientism. They outnumber serious scientists 99 to 1. Many of them teach their religion of scientism in science classes in the public schools.

If children come out of the tax-payer funded schools believing that man will "destroy the planet" unless the USA signs the Kyoto "treaty", they have not learned "science" in science class.